World of Warcraft creator Rob Pardo thinks playing video games should be included in the Olympics as a sport.

However, he is wrong. Video gaming should not be included in the Olympics.

Pardo, who resigned his post as chief creative officer at Blizzard Entertainment in July, made his pitch for including e-sports in the Olympics to the BBC this week.

"Video games are well positioned to be a spectator sport," he told Afternoon Edition on BBC 5 Live. "There's a very good argument for e-sports being in the Olympics. I think the way that you look at e-sports is that it's a very competitive skillset and you look at these professional gamers and the reflexes are lightning quick and they're having to make very quick decisions on the fly.

"When you look at their 'actions per minute', they're clearing over 300."

So Pardo is correct to say that there's a very real market for this stuff. But drawing big crowds does not mean a quasi-athletic pastime should be included in the Olympics.

In fact, it would be easy to simply laugh at Pardo and move along. It's tempting to crack a joke about how the Olympics is supposed to inspire us to get off the sofa rather than dedicate more hours to sitting on it.

Let's instead acknowledge that Pardo makes some fair points and try to honestly explore why his idea is a bad one.

What Makes an Olympic Sport?
For starters, there are already too many Olympic sports that cater to narrow audiences. The organization of the event is already a petri dish for corruption, waste, and villainy. Why add more fuel to the ouch-it-hurts aspect of the Olympic flame with an entirely new kind of resource-hogging spectacle?

It's nice that e-sports is attracting more fans, but a sport like cricket is followed by hundreds of millions and isn't included in the Olympics. That's in large part because the International Cricket Council (ICC) is opposed to it due to the murky financial and scheduling implications for regular international cricket competitions. Proponents of adding e-sports to the Games should probably do a feasibility study before lobbying too hard for that.

There's also just a sense that e-sports and sports included in the Olympics are different in kind. Sure, there's technology used in Olympic sports, ranging from the javelins and discuses used back in the original Greek games, to the state-of-the-art bicycles used in cycling events. But even sports defined by their man-made tools, like fencing and archery, do not feature mechanized or computer-aided technologies.

"If you want to define sport as something that takes a lot of physical exertion, then it's hard to argue that video games should be a sport, but at the same time, when I'm looking at things that are already in the Olympics, I start questioning the definition," he told the BBC.

But it's not just about physical exertion, it's about displays of athleticism unaided by complicated technology.

Sports involving shooting probably come closest to video games, but the rifles used in the biathlon, for example, are bolt-action and not machine-aided. There is no definitive line separating a tech-driven sport that we're comfortable having in the Olympics and one we don't want included, but e-sports seem pretty distant from whatever that arbitrary cut-off point is.

To be clear, this isn't simply an argument for keeping things the way they are, just because. There's obviously plenty of room for e-sports in the global market for spectator attractions and perhaps even enough momentum to create an Olympic-like event around gaming. Pardo and his supporters might be better off trying to organize an entirely new and separate worldwide gathering that celebrates tech-driven competitions instead of trying to squeeze a game controller's menu button into the Olympic rings.

About the Author

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Ch... See Full Bio

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